For the second year in a row, American students won the International Math Olympiad, besting competitors from around the world! About 100 nations send teams of their top students to compete.
The next positions in the team competition were taken by Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, North Korea, Russia, UK, Hong Kong, and Japan.
Do you think you will read about this in the mainstream media? Or in the media owned by the corporate reformers, whose stock in trade is bashing America’s students and teachers?
Congratulations, math champions!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How did the US Charter School Team place?
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How many were from America’s largest public school system?
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I would assume they were juniors and seniors who did this without the benefit(lol) of Common Core math. But we must never forget that “American students are to lazy ,ill trained and stupid to pursue careers in STEM”. Somehow those that make that statement always forget about Adam Smith. I wonder whether these students will be found in a physics lab ,a medical lab … …or designing some toxic time bomb on Wall Street.
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too
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The US winning team:
Allen Liu
Yuan Yao
Junyao Peng
Ashwin Sah
Warren Li
Micheal Kural
Coach: Po-Shen Loh
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They were invited to the White House on Pi day (03.14.16)
When I ask my science students what 3.1416 means I am routinely greeted with shrugs.
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So much for the deeper understanding of math promised by the Common Core cheerleaders.
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When I ask them what the circumference of a can that has a diameter of 10.0 cm is, they ask me, “What’s diameter?”
So much for the deeper understanding of math as promised by Coleman, Gates, and Duncan.
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Rage,
Almost all of us are immigrants. Mine were from Poland and Bessarabia. The newer ones from Asia. Aren’t we lucky to have them?
There is a line in Hamilton: Immigrants get the job done! It gets applause. Hamilton was an immigrant.
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During my thirty years as a teacher, I taught many immigrant children and found most it not all of them to be more involved in their own education, more supportive and respectful of teachers, and harder working.
I can’t say the same thing for some of the children that were born here from parents that were born here. Since the early 1980s when Reagan was president and after his misleading A Nation at Risk report came out, if you were born and grew up in the U.S. you were exposed repeatedly to the lying propaganda from the autocratic, opaque and often fraudulent corporate public education take-over movement, and that has eroded respect for teachers and education that still exists in most of the countries of the world explaining why many of these immigrant children tend to do better and work harder in school. Are there exceptions? Of course there are. I’m sure one of the corporate lovers that haunts this site challenging at every opportunity will-be more than willing to dig up a few examples and alleged that is the norm when it isn’t.
Donald Trump is totally wrong about illegal immigrants. When immigrants come here, legally or illegally, most of them end up working in jobs that most American born citizens refuse to do and these immigrants work longer hours for less pay without the benefits that citizens take for granted.
In fact, Bloomberg reported on Why Americans Won’t do Dirtily Jobs
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-09/why-americans-wont-do-dirty-jobs
And ABC News reported on Why Immigrants’ Children Do Better in School
“Children who immigrate to the United States with their families are likely to outperform kids with a similar background who were born here. And when they grow up, their own children are also likely to do better than their peers.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/immigrants-children-smarter-family-cultural-tools-succeed-study/story?id=17284688
Imaginable where the U.S. would be without those immigrants and their children who have been arriving from all over the world in what that we call the United States today since the 17th century in 1607?
If you are curious about immigration to the United states by decade staring in 1820, click this Scholastic.com link and view the 3 info-graphics. The second info-graphic is by region and the third is based on 50-year Periods/Region. I think these info-graphics paint a fascinating portrait of the U.S.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/immigration_data/
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Immigrants get nothing but admiration from me. As an ESL teacher I have been impressed by the courage and hard work of the most families I have served. Immigrants enhance our country and have been a big part of building it. Contrary to what they spew on Fox News and team Trump, immigrants are a net plus to our economy.
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Warren Li out, Ankan Bhattacharya in.
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My hardest working students are first generation students from Bangladesh.
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The success of first generation immigrant students in American schools suggests that maybe American culture is a bigger problem than bad teachers.
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It’s so painfully unsurprising to see that the same classroom teacher who believes “segregation is a non-issue” also subscribes to the model minority myth.
I am so sorry for you that your students don’t live up to your expectations–but not nearly as sorry as I am for them.
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You continue to avoid the fact that you are an unrepentant schill for the most hyper-segregated, restrictive, and patronizing charter chain in NYC. Until you recant your support for Success Academy you have no business commenting about segregated schools. Your guilt must be warping your ability to think straight because you clearly missed my point on the segregation issue.
You know nothing about my classroom expectations or which myths I subscribe to, and the last thing in the world my students need is your unfounded pity.
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Segregation is a non-issue. A dead horse. Chappaqua and other nearly all-white districts prove it. Then a series of additional comments attempting to substantiate your claims. You wrote all of it. Now you are hilariously playing the “you misinterpreted me” card.
Regarding integration and charter schools attended by students zoned for hypersegregated district schools, I’ll lead you to the Rotberg yet another time! Drink or don’t drink; it is no skin off my nose:
“The primary exceptions to increased student stratification [created by charters] are in communities that are already so highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and income that further increases are virtually impossible . . .”
I feel bad for your students because you are mocking and belittling them on the internet, and because your views on school segregation are embarrassingly retrograde. Hopefully your clock is going to hit 25 years soon.
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Who am I to correct Rage,Lloyd and Diane
I did not see anywhere in the articles or pictures where these kids were holding up Green cards or birth certificates. So I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were born here . Making them Americans, but I will bet that you would be correct in guessing their parent were immigrants . I would also be willing to bet that they are the children of highly educated immigrants probably working in the tech sector and not the short order cook from the take out.
Many American immigrant groups have put a premium on hard work and education . One of my favorite old time movie lines was from “Pride of the Yankees” Lou Gehrig’s mom turns and says “your going to be an engineer like Uncle Otto ” I think Gehrig made the right decision to play a kids game.
Similarly you probably wont find many of the white upper middle class in that math competition, but you may find quite a few in finance.
Harvard is 48 percent white, excluding PreMed how many are STEM
majors? How many Finance or Law?. I know a Grumman engineer who turned to his mathematically brilliant son and threatened to disown him if he choose engineering.One guess where Danny is today .
Lloyd:
:Donald Trump is totally wrong about illegal immigrants. When immigrants come here, legally or illegally, most of them end up working in jobs that most American born citizens refuse to do and these immigrants work longer hours for less pay without the benefits that citizens take for granted.:
Trump is not entirely wrong in making the appeal to control immigration other than the fact that he does not mean it and is a low life demagogue . He loves immigrant labor for its effect in holding down wages. At the high end with H1Bs and the low end of the wage scale. One does not have to deport or punish those that already are here . The key to the issue is who is being affected by that immigration policy and who is benefiting. .
Republicans have refused for decades to have an enhanced worker ID and stiff employer penalties.Then they rail against the undocumented immigrates they hire. Including the Donald
Lets start at the high end of the wage scale
Peter Cappelli of Wharton would argue that “having a shortage of diamonds and having a shortage of diamonds at the price one would like to pay are two different issues “.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-labor-shortage-debunking-a-popular-myth/
We have created that native born STEM shortage with H1b”s and the myth that enables them . In part the myth is why we are all here fighting against, the notion that Public education was massively failing and had to be destroyed to save the economy.
While corporate America rails about American schools and a shortage in STEM most labor economists see no shortage .
At the low end of the educational scale, it is quite simple there are few jobs ,too dirty ,difficult or dangerous that Americans will not do. I supervised for thirty years men who walked out of the NYC subway system sometimes looking like they had been in a coal mine. They actually were highly skilled and very well compensated . They could have had easier jobs in air conditioned ,carpeted office buildings but the 11/2 wages were the attraction.
Remember what Henry Ford said about paying his workers enough to buy the car they were building. No one wanted to work an assembly line till he raised wages, he wasn’t a wonderful employer. The Unions took it a mile further than he intended.
The most dismal job in America might be meat packing at minimum wage and poor working conditions . It is a job where even keeping undocumented immigrants is a problem . . Until 1980 Meat packing didn’t have a turn over problem And working conditions were much better.
It paid 16 % higher than manufacturing . 1980 why that year?.
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/250/meat-packing.html
I’ve posted it before, here it is again Jeffery Sachs of Columbia University certainly no demagogue sees the ever increasing flow of immigration from low wage Nations to high wage high benefit nations as unsustainable. For many reasons including the violent native-ism it will create .Sachs on the meaning of BREXIT
https://www.google.com/search?q=Jeffery+Sachs+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Sanders had addressed the issue of H1bs in the immigration debate he had submitted an amendment that would have required employers to demonstrate that they had sought an American worker before being issued an H1b another to issue that visa to the employee rather than the employer which created wage slavery . He proposed the same thing on the low end for farm workers in the 2007 bill with the support of LULAC and Labor of course the Republicans knocked down both amendments . And Hillary attacked him for his position at the debate.
I would say there are not now nor were there ever free markets. Who ever has control is picking winners and losers. It is the definition of Politics . The choices are made to allow Construction jobs in LA with immigrants from Latin America ,to have Charters with Gulen hired teachers from Turkey or” protect American Doctors from competition by requiring residency to be done in this country. I am sure there are plenty of surgeons all around the world who would be glad to come here and do surgery for less”. Dean Baker .
So are immigrants good people looking for the same things our parents and grand parents sought yes . Do we need immigrants yes. But we also need sane immigration policy that is not designed to destroy American wages.
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Joel,
There is a sane immigration policy, at least it looks sane, but then there is illegal immigration that comes from all over the world, and these people can’t qualify to get in legally, so they sneak in. Because Mexico is next door, most illegal immigrants come from there but not all of them.
This info-graphic shows where 85 percent of the 11.4 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. come from.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://immigration.procon.org/files/1-illegal-immigration-images/countries-of-origin-infographic-V4-758width.JPG&imgrefurl=http://immigration.procon.org/view.resource.php%3FresourceID%3D000845&h=525&w=758&tbnid=27cddGl42CR2nM:&tbnh=160&tbnw=231&docid=ej_UO9eGkrvqOM&usg=__QTLIqqrNTY1Lyaj8oHOBMa_Hniw=&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwirtY7UnfnNAhVR4WMKHV32CU4Q9QEILDAA
What about the jobs these undocumented immigrnats work in.
The Washington Post reports, “Undocumented immigrants hold more white-collar jobs and fewer blue-collar jobs today than they did before the national recession of 2007-2009, but most remain concentrated in lower-skilled, low-paying jobs, “much more so than U.S.-born workers,” according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center in the District.
The report, based on a five-year study from 2007 to 2012, found that the size of the illegal immigrant workforce has remained at 5.1 percent of all workers, even though the total number of illegal immigrants has fallen from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 to about 11.2 million in 2012.
Pew reported that “A solid majority still toil at low-wage jobs including farm labor.”
“Critics of illegal immigration complain that undocumented workers squeeze out American-born workers by undercutting wages. The Pew report did not address that issue, but it found that far higher percentages of illegal immigrants than U.S.-born workers now hold jobs with the least desirable conditions, such as crop picking and animal slaughter.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/majority-of-undocumented-immigrants-work-in-low-skill-jobs-report-finds/2015/03/26/dada9f2a-d3bc-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html
And Forbes reports that “Illegal Immigrants Don’t Lower Our Wages or Take Our Jobs”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/artcarden/2015/08/28/how-do-illegal-immigrants-affect-american-workers-the-answer-might-surprise-you/#38e1c93a6b10
In addition, the Center for Immigra6tion Studies reports On Jobs Americans Won’t Do?
Among the findings:
Of the 465 civilian occupations, only four are majority immigrant. These four occupations account for less than 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans comprise 47 percent of workers in these occupations.
Many jobs often thought to be overwhelmingly immigrant are in fact majority native-born:
Maids and housekeepers: 55 percent native-born
Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 58 percent native-born
Butchers and meat processors: 63 percent native-born
Grounds maintenance workers: 65 percent native-born
Construction laborers: 65 percent native-born
Porters, bellhops, and concierges: 71 percent native-born
Janitors: 75 percent native-born
http://cis.org/illegalImmigration-employment
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Lloyd,
Your last paragraph says it all .Those numbers are huge in those affected industries and in subsets of those industries . National unemployment is at 5% , Four percent used to be the an inflection point in the 60’s. If it were to rise to 7% panic would set in. Thirty five, forty percent of an industry is a devastating wage wedge used by employers to hold down wages . Lets just look at two of those industry’s Meat Packing and construction . That PBS article details the wage decline there is a reason they chose Meat Packing. The once Unionized lower middle income occupation is now the most undesirable occupation in the nation. Wages are at minimum wage. Employers used the undocumented to accomplish the transformation . I am not blaming the immigrant he is merely the pawn.
Construction in La 40%, NY 35% immigrant labor, what do these numbers mean? At the height of the “great recession”, unemployment in the NY construction industry was about 18%-24 % depending on trade. That translated to well over a year or two of unemployment for most trades . But I would be disingenuous to say that immigration affected all Trades equally. However the residential construction sector in Manhattan once totally union is now struggling. The market share is limited to massive projects where the skill level is highest.
Developers are now attempting to build the Tallest apartment building in NYC with totally non union mostly immigrant legal and illegal labor . The Hudson Yards developer a 15billion dollar project on the west side of Manhatten threatened to build a ramp ,dock a boat in the Hudson and use imported Chinese labor under a permit program to build the project. He settled for a 15% wage reduction in a PLA ,Project Labor Agreement.
To those workers there is nothing imaginary about the threat to their Jobs .
The H1B program is legal immigration, is portrayed as bringing brilliant minds to fill a need in the labor market . In reality the current program is an outsourcing arrangement where;
“The H-1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him,” Ron Hira
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h1b-visas-hurt-tech-workers
So what percentage of charters in a district does it take to devastate Public Schools .
What percentage of TFA or Gulen H1Bs to lower the wage of Unionized teachers ?
It is that recession vs depression thing, depending who is unemployed.
By the way I have basically been unscathed personally but have seen many who have suffered loss of job, home and family.
None of this is seeking to scapegoat immigrants . They are doing what we all do ,trying to survive . The problem is two fold. Employers are able to game the system of legal and illegal immigration that has to be brought under control . With honest discussion as to what the needs of the workforce are and not just from a profit point of view but from its affect on the American standard of living. The latest AFL-CIO position is that legal status will enable immigrant workers a voice and unionization . I fear those goals will have to wait for for pitchforks and guillotines.
As in the issue of Trade we can tout out all sorts of statistics about the bennifits, the question is who is receiving those benefits.
The 15 million(with multiplier effect) who have lost jobs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan…..even the non union South would disagree with elites about the wonders of trade. The effects of automation were there long before free trade agreement yet the numbers of job losses fall off the charts immediately after the agreements come in place.
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/trade-and-jobs-in-pennsylvania
The funny thing is on all these issues including the education wars, we find the same political divide with the neo-liberal elites on the same side of most issues.
We are no longer a vast frontier waiting to be explored .With the number of Americans who are struggling especially in our minority communities . It would seem that a tighter labor market could only help to empower workers. This deserves a full rational discussion which like education, it will not get. It is no accident that both the demagogue on the right and the socialist on the left have struck a nerve with vast numbers of American across the educational spectrum. The middle class is getting hammered and no amount of sugar coating by Tom Perez will change the facts on the ground . Five percent unemployment today is not your fathers (our)unemployment not when you take in the Elisabeth Warren factor of the “Two Parent Trap” . Further the economic quality of the jobs has to be taken into account .
Sorry Lloyd, but we will not create jobs by educating the work force for jobs that do not exist. As Krugman said in “Sympathy for the Luddites” “Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).” Which to me does not call into question the need for education but rather the goals of education.
The second problem we have to look at when discussing the economy , immigration, even population, is what are the limits to growth . How much growth can we afford without exasperating the resources of the Nation and the Planet .What do we want our communities to look like .
The NY Times had a piece at the Time of the 1964 Worlds Fair that pictured a world in the 21st century where Americans would be so bored form leisure that they would clamor for a day of work to break the boredom. Somehow that vision is long lost ,so what will the world of the future look like? More and more it is looking like what some of our dystopian novelists have portrayed.
Listen Lloyd its a beautiful Day in NY as I hope it is on the West Coast I’m sure we will continue this another day . Have a good day.
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I agree, educating children for jobs that won’t exist will not work, but that is exactly what the premise and promise is behind the corporate carter school movement. Instead of educating and indoctrinating children for corporate jobs that won’t exist, we should be educating them to be life long learners through high levels of literacy, problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Once an adult is highly literate, enjoys reading for pleasure and has problem solving and critical thinking skills, that adult is a life long learner and can learn new skills and change professions as needed.
And that was the focus of public education before Reagan’s misleading A Nation at Risk report in 1983 followed by NCLB, RTTT and the Common Core Crap with its very profitable high stakes tests that were developed in secrecy to profit corporations and the few that own the controlling shares of those corporations.
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Your never ending desire to twist the truth into lies is remarkable. My comments about pi and diameter had nothing to do with mocking my students. It was a statement of truth and if you bothered to read carefully it was a shot at Common Core math and it’s continued failure to make due on the snake oil promises of Coleman, Duncan, and Gates. Next time think before you type.
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There was a U.S. public school principal who broke down the PISA scores by socioeconomic level and he revealed that America’s children from the most educated and affluent famlies beat every child in the world even at their own socioeconomic level on the PISA test.
I’ve written about this principal’s report and linked to it from my Crazy Normal blog before, but his report isn’t that easy to find through Google.
He explained with proof that the reason the U.S. average on the PISA is so low compared to other countries is because of the high child poverty rate in the U.S. and even then our poor children outperform almost every country in the world for their own socioeconomic level, and they are continuing to improve while other countries are not. Even a report out of Stanford several years ago supports this.
The United States consistently has one of the highest rates of childhood poverty in the world, and even PISA reports that childhood poverty impacts learning.
If you watch this video from the OECD about the PISA, you will discover that the OECD/PISA does not support what the autocratic, opaque, teacher-bashing, teachers’ unions breaking, corporate public education take-over movement for profit and brainwashing is doing in the United States to the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit traditional public schools. Instead of destroying the profession of teaching, PISA recommends supporting teachers and improving teacher training. And pay attention when the video talks about the impact caused by childhood poverty.
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“There was a U.S. public school principal who broke down the PISA scores by socioeconomic level and he revealed that America’s children from the most educated and affluent famlies beat every child in the world even at their own socioeconomic level on the PISA test.”
That isn’t what that principal (I think it was a teacher, actually) did.
He compared US schools with <10% FRPL-eligible enrollments to entire countries that had OECD poverty rates <10%. This is far from being "apples to apples."
When you compare affluent US schools with other nation's affluent schools, the US doesn't fare well: "Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, noted that American students from families with incomes in the highest quartile did not perform as well as students with similar backgrounds in other countries."
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He was not a teacher. His name is Gerald N. Tirozzi, and he is or was the executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Here is the link to Tirozzi’s report:
http://www.schoolfunding.info/news/policy/2011-01PISA.php3
Now anyone who read Tim’s comment and reads the original report, can read it for themselves and make their own minds up instead of letting Tim tell them what to think.
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In addition, if anyone is curious who this, according to TIm, alleged teacher really is, here is a link to a bio on Bloomberg.com for Gerald N. Tirozzi. As you will discover, Dr. Tirozzi was a science teacher a long time ago.
I’ve copied and pasted the Background portion of the info I found on on Bloomberg.
“Gerald N. Tirozzi served as an Executive Director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) until July 1, 2011.
Dr. Tirozzi has an extensive background in the educational field and is a nationally recognized leader in education reform.
Prior to joining NASSP in March 1999, Dr. Tirozzi held a variety of positions in the field of education. These included: Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education from 1996 to 1999; Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Connecticut from 1993 to 1995; President of Wheelock College from 1991 to 1993; Commissioner of Education in Connecticut from 1983 to 1991; Superintendent of New Haven (CT) Public Schools from 1977 to 1983.
Early in his career, Tirozzi also served as science teacher, assistant principal, and principal.
Dr. Tirozzi serves on a number of national educational advisory boards, task forces, and professional organizations. Some of these include: the Educational Research Service, the League, the Learning First Alliance, Pearson Education National Policy Board, the USA Today Education Advisory Panel, and the U.S. Department of State’s Overseas Schools Advisory Council. Dr. Tirozzi is the author of numerous articles on educational topics that have been published in educational and scholarly journals. Some of these writings have been collected in the publication, Reflections on School Leadership.
Dr. Tirozzi’s public service and leadership have been recognized by a number of state and national organizations. Some of these include: the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Horace Mann League, the U.S. Department of Education, Michigan State University, and the Connecticut Legislature. Dr. Tirozzi holds a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Educational Administration and Higher Education from Michigan State University. He has a Sixth Year Certificate in Education Administration from Fairfield University in Connecticut. He received a Master of Arts Degree in Guidance and Counseling and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Elementary Education from Southern Connecticut State University.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=109768968&privcapId=6701700
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Tim:
So here is the way this goes, students in Roslyn NY out preformed Shanghai. If I happen to live in Roslyn or any of the dozens of districts in long Island with similar median income ,as a parent what do I care what the National average is . Now of course you might claim that is unfair to compare wealthy districts in affluent Long Island to a province of China with 17 million people . To which I would say tell me when the OECD starts administering the test in Shanghai. . When they do tell me when they come up with the half million children of migrant laborers who are exclude from HS. After you find those missing students perhaps you can explain why we are discussing Shanghai and not China.
But all of this is irrelevant. The question is do we provide enough STEM and other college graduates to meet the needs of the economy. The teacher I will refer you to is Adam Smith . You see Tim, “when there is a shortage of skills those who have the skills will arbitrage their services between employers and wages will rise.” Adam stipulated that a long time ago . He phrased it a little different, we call it the “Law of Supply and Demand ” You don’t have to take the word of those pinko lefty labor economists who say there is no shortage . The great Lawrence Summers himself self said that :
“there is no evidence in all but maybe 2% of the economy which points to any shortage of skilled labor”. He went on to say “I am afraid we could train the a whole lot of people to take the jobs of those that already have them “. All of this is validated by the NYC controller who found that millennials in NYC ,who I think are certainly better educated are earning 20% less than the previous generation .They must be 20% less educated . Does NAEP show that.
So lets talk about the poor and the economy. The only way to solve our education problems is to solve our economic problems . You see Tim we could educate a million more engineers and we would not have created any jobs in engineering. Or we could force the Oligarchs and plutocrats that are funding your efforts to destroy public schools to pay their workers a living wage. In NY that would be far more than 15 an hour . This would create increased spending as poor and working class people would have a little disposable income. Increased spending would create increased demand , increased demand would create the need for more employees and more infrastructure which would require more engineers . “The rising tide would lift all boats”.
While we are at it Tim could you ask Alice ,Paul and the boys to stop hording money in off shore tax havens. Because there are two ways that we can stimulate this economy and reduce poverty . Which is the only way to improve educational outcomes for a multitude of reasons. The second is called government spending and I would much rather take the revenue required from those that have the most than those who have the least .
But we can go on pretending that schools and teachers are the problem. For a while the declining middle class will turn to demagogues like Trump. But sooner or later as Nick Hanauer has said the poor and the working class are going to bring out the pitchforks , they always do.
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Hi, Lloyd,
I was thinking of a similar disaggregation done by a teacher named Daniel Wydo, whose work was linked to by Diane. My apologies.
But my critique remains the same. OECD poverty rates and free- or reduced-price lunch eligibility are two different measures, and the study assumes no variance in the poverty rate in individual schools in other OECD nations. Finland’s overall poverty rate may be much lower than the US’s, but not every single Finnish school is low-poverty.
The fairest, soundest, and best apples-to-apples comparison is the type that’s made on p. 18 of this NCES report, where scores for each country are broken up by income quartiles. In it you’ll see that the US trails OECD averages across the board: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014024_tables.pdf
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Tim –
Even if what you say is true
Who cares?
If some countries are doing better than us on a test, well then – Good for Them!
My concern is the future of my children and grandchildren. I want them to have a well rounded education, not have to submit to a slanted curriculum to play catch up with foreign countries.
I also want the same sort of enrichment for other people’s kids, especially those in the inner city and rural areas where poverty dictates their life style.
There are opportunities out there that have nothing to do with Europe, Asia, or the other continents. Call me an isolationist, but I think some of our priorities are kind of skewed at the moment. While Charter Schools might have been the answer at one point, they’ve evolved into a huge problem which needs to be addressed. Even those “good”‘ones are still bleeding the public schools dry – not the original intent as I understand the concept.
Let us congratulate our winners. They deserve the praise and our admiration, but let us also keep our eye on the prize – the opportunity for all our youth to be successful in some aspect of their lives.
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Yes, according to NCES.ed.gov using free or reduced lunches is not an accurate measurement of child poverty, but NCES.ed.gov reports that “Despite its limitations, the free/reduced price lunch data are frequently used by education researchers as a proxy for school poverty since this count is generally available at the school level, while the poverty rate is typically not available. Because the free/reduced price lunch eligibility is derived from the federal poverty level, and therefore highly related to it, the free/reduced price lunch percentage is useful to researchers from an analytic perspective.”
http://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lunch-a-proxy-for-poverty
Using free/reduced lunches as a way to measure child hood poverty rates in public schools is the only measurement they have, and it cannot be so easily dismissed.
It is also safe to say that children that qualify for free/reduced lunch in schools with rates below 10 percent have little or no poverty at all and are even more affluent than schools with rates higher than 70 percent.
Using the free/reduced lunch program is not perfect to measure childhood poverty rates, but it is better than nothing and anyone who dismisses it out of hand is someone to ignore. I think it is safe to say that most if not all children who are really living in brutal poverty are included in the free/reduced lunch programs.
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Joel
Perfectly stated. The legacy of our current plutocracy is poverty without hope. Tim sees failing schools instead of a failure of political will to restore hope for the millions of (mostly) minorities mired in the underclass. Hope in the form of meaningful work at a living wage. Thanks for taking the time to make your case so well.
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… and did you notice they all went to charter schools? Uh, well, no … none of them did.
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LOL
Good one!
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go amurika, sis boom bah.
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Just to add some information These are the high schools the team came from: Personally, I think this was an incredible achievement. It also has a lot more to do with an independent math culture from groups like Art of Problem Solving than any curriculum being taught in these buildings. The relationship between the math being done here and that in standard courses is very limited.
Public:
Greenwich High School, Riverside, Connecticut
Penfield Senior High School, Penfield, New York
Selective Public:
International Academy East, Troy, Michigan
Private:
Princeton International School of Mathematics and Science, Princeton, New Jersey
Jesuit High School, Portland, Oregon
Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire
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Excellent point regarding math curriculum v math culture.
And thanks for the info on schools.
Here is a link to the Day #1 math problems from the 2016 International math Olympiad.
file:///C:/Users/bobrick/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/C3VQD3YY/2016_eng.pdf
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Corrected link.
International Math Olympiad
https://www.imo-official.org/problems.aspx
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Politicians and corporations have long thrived on fear-mongering in the United States. When it comes to comparing our country with others, xenophobic tendencies seem to emerge. It is to the benefit of politicians and corporations who support charter schools in the United States not to broadcast stories like this that actually show that the United States can succeed. They would rather broadcast the country’s “failures” in order to further their agendas, which are rarely those that favor disadvantaged children.
The country’s failure, however, is not in public education, but in acts such as No Child Left Behind or the Every Student Succeeds Act that give benefits to students, schools, and teachers in prosperous neighborhoods, and punish schools in poverty because of test scores. It is poverty that excludes schools from competing internationally. Students cannot compete when they are cold and hungry or when they and their families have no access to healthcare.
The same persistent xenophobia that attempts to use international test score comparisons to strike fear in Americans also contributes to the lack of support or limitations for laws which would benefit undocumented immigrant students and their families, such as the DREAM Act, DACA, and DAPA.
The PISA video posted above (Thank you, Lloyd!) noted that comparing test results was not intended to create competition between countries, but to demonstrate how countries can improve education. There is no fair way to compare test results from one country with another for the purpose of competition, especially when not all countries suffer from the same monetary inequalities, social injustices, or child poverty rates. Instead of using these competitions to fuel corporate control over American schools, they should be used as a way to raise or awareness of global trends in education and learn from each other in order to support a global community.
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This was a very erudite discussion. That strayed somewhat. The wonderful children who successfully competed certainly should be high-fived, and the great pool that produced them should be proud that they too almost made the cut. Dianne is certainly correct; the media will not have a lot of this for their intellectual menu.
But I am not sure that competitions in education are all that effective. Did Fernand Braudel or Marc Bloch, the great Anales historians win competitions? How about Mark Twain, who came up in the Esquidth article above? No, these people were from a different culture. Their type of competition came from the process of getting your ideas to float in the great marketplace of thought. I hope Joel is not correct about the free market (see above discussion) when it comes to ideas. I feel that the free world has benefited greatly from free thinking people. Restricted intellectual soil has historically produced poor intellectual crops. This process bears little resemblance to a competition, which is very restrictive insofar as intellectual process is concerned.
The real test of whether any individual is well educated, is whether the education guides the student through a successful intellectual life. This is hard to pin down. As I travel through the Great Plains states, I am always amazed that each tiny town has a museum celebrating its people. Go through these places and the education of the people who organized them is obvious. The degree of local funding suggest something about education too. But these are just observations. This is not DATA. Today there is the fiction that there exists data that will say something about education. It does not. Wait a generation, then look at the society. Then you might have an idea. But you still will have no data, for data implies measurement, and only in a competition can you measure something. Or can you?
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“. . . the great marketplace of thought.”
AAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
Please, Roy, give me the address of this supposed “great marketplace” of thought. Nothing like viewing the world through the darkened/obscure lens of economics, eh!
Enlightenment thought, which managed to sprout and eventually survive and grow tall (like a kudzu if you are a religious or economic worshiper) despite the many efforts to orthodoxize free thinking, is not the result of some glorious “marketplace”.
What has ensured that free thought can survive and thrive is the First Amendment of the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
That vaunted “marketplace of thought” has nothing to do with actually ensuring that all ideas/thoughts may be expressed and either accepted or rejected on their own intellectual merits.
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The marketplace metaphor, like the melting pot metaphor, is perhaps naive. But Twain and the two French historians I mention above eventually earned respect some way. Call it what you will. Amendment I and the French traditions that relate to it are worth much to us. Certainly they are worth more than a math competition.
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Cross-posted th article with your comment at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Team-USA-has-won-the-2016-in-General_News-American-Schools_Mathematics_Students-160717-12.html
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Hi Diane! Thanks for spreading the good news about the Olympiad team!
On a somewhat related note, I’m with a math education nonprofit, and was hoping I could send you a recent interview we did with Stanford mathematician Jim Milgram. I think you’d be interested in reading his thoughts. Is there an email address I could reach you at to forward it? Thanks so much!
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Derek,
You can send the interview link here or find my address at NYU.
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